It is possible to see Thea Astley, in her four published novels, searching for a form capable of keeping the recalcitrance of life within the definition and completeness of an art, and the loosest of arts, at that. She tries first the shifting kaleidoscope of impressions: an ordinary mind is touched to memory by the day’s most credible proceedings, in the hope that time and the novel may finally stand as one and a whole history be fulfilled. Or she tries to restrict her novel carefully within the life she has known and to make that life a microcosm. Or ties herself to completeness in the whole life of her hero. None of these devices sets her free again. But they allow her to approach her fourth novel with a firmer trust in the mercy of more traditional means, where character and events are involved in a plot still able to convince and please, not least by bringing the novel towards artistic ends. 

Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958. The heroine is setting off in the evening on the Brisbane train, and the novel has to find form and unity from this fact. As a limiting condition for art to work in, it is a good choice, and it leaves some impression of completeness on the mind. In the process of reading, however, as the heroine, Elsie, tidies up in this Queensland town and remembers what happened to her there, the fluctuations in time have little power over the reader.